


Pride of the House

by patrokla



Category: The Libertines
Genre: Gen, Kittens, M/M, Pre-Slash, The Delaney Mansions, pre-fame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 03:31:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5076136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘Carl,’ Pete begins, and Carl narrows his eyes. Pete’s hands are behind his back. Carl has a bad feeling.</p>
<p>‘Carl, how do you feel about cats?’ Pete asks, and Carl sighs.</p>
<p>‘This again? I told you last night, they’re alright, but we don’t have the room for one here. We haven’t even got room for us, or another mattress.’</p>
<p>‘All good points,’ Pete says, nodding along like he’s a reasonable person in any way. ‘Have you considered this, though?’</p>
<p>And with that ominous pronouncement he brings his hands out from behind his back. There’s a kitten in each one, and as Carl watches in horror a third pokes its head out of Pete’s coat pocket.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pride of the House

**Author's Note:**

> I've been wanting to write something fluffy and ridiculous for the last few days, and then a few hours ago I saw that video of Pete and his four...six...more? kittens on tumblr, and then I sat down and wrote this in about an hour. And now, after some nominal editing, I'm putting it up, because I've got a research thing due tonight and if I don't post this now I'll just think about it all day. So. I'm sorry about the bizarre formatting and punctuation.
> 
> Title is from Baudelaire's 'Les Chats' - I was going to use the original, but 'orgueil' is sort of a hideous word.

It starts when they’re out on a walk ('An adventure!' Pete had said, and then piled three scarves around Carl’s neck) and Pete nearly gets a finger bitten off by an stray cat lurking in an alley.  
  
Actually, Carl suspects it started much earlier than that. Probably stemmed from Pete never having a pet as a kid and living in barracks for half his life. He wonders if this was always Pete’s father’s plan, to raise an army brat and then foist him onto a member of the unsuspecting public (Carl). It’s an uncharitable thought, but given what Pete has done, Carl isn’t particularly inclined to feel charitably towards him.  
  
And what has Pete done? Well:  
  
Amidst Pete moaning and groaning about losing his finger and never becoming a famous rockstar, Carl had glimpsed the look on his face as he watched the cat. It was the sort of rapturous but calculating look he’d seen on girls looking at babies. It concerned Carl greatly.  
  
As usual, he was right to be concerned.  
  
They eventually got back to the flat, and into the flat (always an ordeal. Carl should’ve held out for a place with a working door, he really should’ve). Pete had spent the rest of the night penning odes to cats, and Carl had spent it half worrying that Pete could actually get an infection, and half wondering if it was illegal to murder someone on the grounds that they were ridiculous.

('I’m sorry, your Honour, but he spent all night on the sofa wearing a bonnet and singing about cats.'

'Ah, well in that case, we’ll chalk it up to a crime of passion.')  
  
At some point Carl passed out, and possibly Pete did, although he’d been in one of those moods lately where he didn’t much care for sleep, and then, awfully, it was morning. Morning meant, among other things, not sleeping. Morning meant trying to make his hair look presentable when he hadn’t showered in a week and the hot water was out completely. Morning meant going to the salad factory.  
  
Carl had worked a number of mindnumbing jobs in the last few years, but the salad factory surpassed them all. He blamed his coworkers, in part. No one talked to each other, excepting the occasional ‘going on break,' and the result was that they all stood in what was basically a massive refrigerator packing lettuce in bags for hours on end, in absolute silence. The only noise was the rustling of the lettuce, and the rare unconscious humming.  
  
To deal with this stripping of humanity, Carl - and most of his coworkers - had no choice but to turn to a few different chemicals to get through the day. Possibly that also contributed to the silence, the fact that they were all high as fucking kites, but at the root of it was the work itself, Carl was sure. And they had to wear hairnets, which was an indignity too far.  
  
So Carl makes his way back to the flat after six hours in a chilly metal box and collapses on the sofa after wrapping himself up in a blanket. He’s not particularly inclined to move, or to eat, or do anything really except lie on his back and stare up at the ceiling as the pills he’d swallowed at lunch slowly work themselves out of his blood.  
  
Pete’s not there, he notices after about an hour of this. It’s not uncommon for Pete to be gone when Carl gets home; he’s always going off to busk in a station, or beg drinks from people at the pub, or just go wandering. He’s a strange one, Carl thinks, watching the ceiling shimmer. Strange in the same sorts of ways that Carl suspects he himself is strange in, though, and that makes it alright. That makes all the difference.  
  
He’s just thinking of getting up to find something partially edible when Pete pokes his head through the window.  
  
‘Oi, Carlos, mind opening this up a bit more? I’ve got something I’m bringing in.’  
  
Carl grumbles to hide the fact that he’s not 100% sure his fingers work at present, and staggers off the sofa. They usually keep the window open just enough for Pete to force his gangly frame through, mostly because they never remember to shut it and at least like this the cold and any potential burglars don’t have much room to get in.  
  
‘What’ve you got with you?’ Carl asks as he forces the frame up, wincing at the scraping sound it makes.  
  
‘Oh, y’know,’ Pete says vaguely, and he makes his way through the window very gingerly.  
  
In the back of his head, Carl wonders for half a second if it’s because - if Pete’s doing _that_ again. He promised he wouldn’t, but they have been skint…maybe Carl should pick up more shifts at the salad factory?  
  
His musings are interrupted by Pete reaching back out through the window to pull a garbage bag through. Carl could swear that it makes a squeak as it comes through, but that’s probably just the pills.  
  
(He has a terrible feeling that it isn’t.)  
  
‘Cuppa?’ he asks, wandering over to the stove. The electricity is the one thing that does work, which is a bit miraculous because Carl can’t remember getting a bill for it in ages. He clatters around, wiping old mugs out with a rag and watching the steam start to curl out of the kettle. There’s something joyously possessive about making noise in your own kitchen, pushing a cupboard door closed with your foot just because you can. Just because it’s yours. ('Course the door nearly falls off its hinges completely when Carl does that, but it’s the principle of the matter.)  
  
He turns around, mugs in hand, just in time to see Pete straighten up from where he’s been crouched over the garbage bag.  
  
‘Carl,’ Pete begins, and Carl narrows his eyes. Pete’s hands are behind his back. Carl has a bad feeling.  
  
‘Carl, how do you feel about cats?’ Pete asks, and Carl sighs.  
  
‘This again? I told you last night, they’re alright, but we don’t have the room for one here. We haven’t even got room for _us_ , or another mattress.’  
  
‘All good points,’ Pete says, nodding along like he’s a reasonable person in any way. ‘Have you considered this, though?’  
  
And with that ominous pronouncement he brings his hands out from behind his back. There’s a kitten in each one, and as Carl watches in horror a third pokes its head out of Pete’s coat pocket.  
  
He’s blindsided by this, somehow, but in hindsight he should’ve seen it coming. Pete’s never done anything by halves in his life, and Carl should’ve expected this, really.  
  
‘Carl, don’t be mad,’ Pete says in his best pleading voice, which Carl fucking hates because it’s accompanied by Pete tilting his head and widening his already massive eyes, and the whole picture is one of absolute patheticness. Carl falls for it _every damn time_.  
  
Not this time, though.  
  
‘Pete, we can’t possibly take care of three kittens. We can’t take care of one. How would we feed them? Where will they sleep or shit or - or do anything? The flat is a tip, you can’t subject kittens to that!’  
  
‘Four kittens, actually,’ Pete says, biting his lip guiltily and ignoring all of Carl's incredibly important points. Carl watches in disbelief as the fourth kitten makes an appearance from where it’d been placed in Pete’s hood, nosing around Pete’s neck and looking cute, yes, but untenable as well.  
  
‘Pete,’ Carl says, sighing and setting down the mugs on the counter, ‘this can’t possibly work. There is no way for this to work.’  
  
‘What was I supposed to do, Carlos? They were left in a box in the park, anything could’ve happened to them!’  
  
Pete’s giving Carl his ‘only a monster would refuse me’ look now. Carl hates this boy, he really does.  
  
Only he doesn’t, because instead of tossing the kittens out the window like the callous bastard he is, he’s moving forward and picking up the one that’s about to tumble from Pete’s pocket.  
  
It’s tiny, absolutely tiny, covered in grey fur with an especially tiny pink nose. It looks up at him with its tiny kitten eyes, and Carl melts just the littlest bit.  
  
‘Alright, but only until we find them new homes,’ he finds himself saying, like a madman.  
  
Pete’s grin threatens to split his face and blind Carl in the process, and he rushes into Carl’s space, pressing a kiss against his cheek gratefully.  
  
‘You won’t regret this,’ he says, as the kitten in his hood tries to crawl onto his head. One of the ones he’d been carrying had tumbled onto the floor as he’d moved forward, and Carl watches in horror as it moves unsteadily towards an ashtray.  
  
‘I already do,’ he says, but he's only 30% serious, and Pete keeps on smiling at him.  
  
’Impossible,’ Pete says, putting the kitten in his hand on his head, and bringing the one in his hood up to join it. ‘Now, what should we name them?’  
  
Yeah, Carl definitely regrets this.

**Author's Note:**

> There might be more of this, but in case there isn't I want you all to know that one of the kittens is named Belvedere. Also Pete probably goes and gets a job to support the kittens, and they end up moving into a less awful flat, and possibly they never start a band and live with their cats and poetry, and it's actually quite nice in the end.


End file.
